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OONI Devops

This document outlines some of the best practices we follow when developing and deploying OONI services.

Infrastructure Tiers

We divide our infrastructure components into 3 tiers:

  • Tier 0: Critical: These are mission critical infrastructure components. If these become unavailable or have significant disruption, it will have a major impact.

  • Tier 1: Essential: These components are important, but not as critical as tier 0. They are part of our core operations, but if they become unavailable the impact is important, but not major.

  • Tier 2: Non-Essential: These are auxiliary components. Their unavailability does not have a major impact.

Tier 0 (Critical) components

  • Probe Services (collector specifically)
  • Fastpath (part responsible for storing post-cans)
  • DNS configuration
  • Monitoring
  • OONI bridges
  • OONI.org website
  • Web Connectivity test helpers
  • Code signing

Tier 1 (Essential) components

  • OONI API measurement listing
  • OONI Explorer
  • OONI Run
  • OONI Data analysis pipeline
  • OONI Findings API
  • Website analytics

Tier 2 (Non-Essential) components

  • Test list editor
  • Jupyter notebooks
  • Countly

DNS and Domains

The primary domains used by the backend are:

  • ooni.org
  • ooni.io
  • ooni.nu

DNS naming policy

The public facing name of services, follows this format:

  • <service>.ooni.org

Examples:

  • explorer.ooni.org
  • run.ooni.org

Public-facing means the FQDNs are used directly by external users, services, or embedded in the probes. They cannot be changed or retired without causing outages.

Use public facing names sparingly and when possible start off by creating a private name first. Not every host needs to have a public facing name. For example staging and testing environments might not have a public facing name.

Each service also has public name which points to the specific host running that service, and these are hosted in the .io zone. This is helpful because sometimes you might have the same host running multiple services or you might also have multiple services behind the same public service endpoint (eg. in the case of an API gateway setup).

Name in the .io zone should always include also the environment name they are related to:

  • <service>.prod.ooni.io for production services
  • <service>.test.ooni.io for test services

When there may be multiple instances of a service running, you can append a number to the service name. Otherwise the service name should be only alphabetic characters.

Examples:

  • clickhouse.prod.ooni.io
  • postgres0.prod.ooni.io
  • postgres1.prod.ooni.io
  • prometheus.prod.ooni.io
  • grafana.prod.ooni.io

Finally, the actual host which runs the service, should have a FQDN defined inside of the .nu zone.

This might not apply to every host, especially in a cloud environment. The FQDN in the .nu are the ones which are going to be stored in the ansible inventory file and will be used as targets for configuration management.

The structure of these domains is:

  • <name>.<location>.[prod|test].ooni.nu

The location tag can be either just the provider name or provider name - the location.

Here is a list of location tags:

  • htz-fsn: Hetzner on Falkenstein
  • htz-hel: Hetzner in Helsinki
  • grh-ams: Greenhost in Amsterdam
  • grh-mia: Greenhost in Miami
  • aws-fra: AWS in Europe (Frankfurt)

Examples:

  • monitoring.htz-fsn.prod.ooni.nu